Those are useful facts for the companies seeking to replace bar codes with a controversial new technology called RFID. Radio-frequency identification tags come in sizes smaller than a grain of rice, and generate a signal with unique identifying information about each product, crate or pallet of products they sit on. Digital RFID readers can pick up the signal from several feet away, so workers don’t have to manipulate the items to read them. The technology has been used for years in car-ignition keys and EZ Pass tollbooths and to track pets and livestock. But recently the price of the chips has fallen, sending the cost of RFID tags close to 10 cents apiece. That’s unlocked a realm of potential applications for the technology–and anxieties from privacy advocates who worry that the chips can be used to peek into our private lives. Declining costs have also prompted retail giant Wal-Mart to ask its suppliers to use the technology in all pallets and crates by the end of 2006. Kevin Ashton, who heads the MIT Auto-ID Center, which is developing standards for RFID, says that “for the first time, companies are starting to imagine using RFID on a large scale.”
Their ideas for RFID are still fairly modest, at least for now. The wireless transmitters make most sense behind the scenes of stores, attached to crates of products, where at each step of the supply chain they wirelessly emit information about which goods are where. Eager for anything that can cut costs–and reduce the number of employees–efficiency-obsessed merchants and manufacturers like Wal-Mart, Procter & Gamble and Gillette are all experimenting with the technology. But the real dreaming begins when companies discuss the day that RFID tags are cheap enough to attach to trillions of everyday items, something not likely for at least a decade. With tags on products, employees will quickly know when empty shelves need to be restocked, and stores can eliminate theft by putting readers on doors. The tags could also remain active through the life of the product, carrying warranties and warnings if a product is made from harmful material.
That’s where privacy advocates start wringing their hands. If all the things we own, including our clothes, invisibly emit data, what will stop voracious companies from reading those tags to see what we’re likely to buy? Or, even worse, who will prevent governments from tracking our location with RFID readers buried in the ground, in doorways or at airports? For the past year privacy organizations around the world have been asking these questions. When Gillette, Wal-Mart and Italian retailer Benetton talked about experimenting with RFID tags on individual items, rather than crates, privacy advocates organized protests and Internet boycotts. Each company subsequently backed off, although they claim they simply decided that RFID isn’t cheap enough yet to put on individual items. The RFID industry responds to privacy concerns by saying it will offer kill switches that allow consumers to turn off the chip once they leave the store. That doesn’t give opponents much comfort. “A kill switch is not particularly reassuring to people with my world view,” says Katherine Albrecht, a Harvard doctoral student who has been leading the charge, and who owns a bookshelf full of material about oppressive 20th-century governments that exploited available technologies.
Privacy worries are only one of the challenges RFID makers must overcome. The technology is not perfect yet; the radio signals have trouble getting through metals and liquids. Just meeting Wal-Mart’s 2006 edict to its suppliers to deploy RFID at the case level is a massive challenge. RFID firms say they’ve manufactured several hundred million chips over the past decade; 60 billion items move through Wal-Mart each year. If RFID can clear these hurdles, the bar code might end up in a museum–for good.
